David - Would you allow me to put your letter on my web site? I think people are twigging that we have an entirely illusory democracy.

Anne - Engagement with Palestine certainly opens our eyes to layers of reality which we might otherwise never have suspected, including the fallacy of democracy and the sophisticated machinery of social manipulation used to conceal the institutional and material violence of the system we really live under.

Anne to Rosie Cooper, MP
House of Commons
Dear Rosie,

It is difficult to write to you about the events of the last few days without a note of sardonic humour.

 

On Sunday Tzipi Livni was due to speak at the JNF conference at Hendon Hall hotel in Hendon, London. The manager tells me she was totally taken by surprise by the demonstration that took place outside the hotel and the telephone calls of protest she received. She didn't know Tzipi Livni from Cinderella. She didn't know who the JNF are. She didn't know that her honoured guest had been Foreign Minister in the rogue apartheid government that carried out an act of criminal aggression (UN Rapporteur on Human Rights in Palestine, Richard Falk's words) against the besieged, starving, imprisoned people of Gaza. She didn't know that 400 innocent children had been massacred and 1400 children orphaned of at least one parent. She didn't know that 100% of the Gazan population are suffering trauma as a result of the prolonged and vicious siege endorsed by the UK government, the EU, the USA and the state of Israel, as well as from the assault. She didn't know that Tzipi Livni's justification of her governments crimes is based on the lie that Hamas had broken the ceasefire when in fact it is well-documented by /Israeli /monitors that Israel broke the ceasefire and that Israel deliberately planned the assault even before it had signed the peace agreement. She didn't know that Israel has spitefully prevented construction materials into Gaza for the last year in spite of the urgent need to rebuild the homes,schools, mosques, hospitals, clinics, food-processing plants, farms, sewage plant bombed by Israel during their criminal assaults.

However, the redeeming feature of this gracious lady is that, when she was informed of the above facts, she was outraged that such a person had been booked into her hotel and she took prompt action. She telephoned the JNF organiser and banned his organisation from ever using the hotel again. She apologised profusely for inadvertently taking booking for such people. In other words, she has the moral sensibility not to host war criminals. Would it be possible to have her as the next Foreign Minister?

Please pass on my letter to David, Ivan, Gordon and the governments' many other strategic partners and friends of the "only democracy" in the Middle East. I do quite understand that they must ensure the re-writing of the law which currently provides for warrants to be issued for the arrest of war criminals. God forbid that war criminals should ever be embarassed by being arrested on British soil! The governmental holy trinity must protect their friends from the law. If they don't stick by their friends now, they may find themselves and brother Tony in the dock for war crimes in Iraq. That would cause embarassment, wouldn't it?

Tomorrows EDM tabled by Jeremy Corbin, asking that UK law based on the Geneva Conventions is left in tact, will no doubt be ignored by most MPs. The Geneva Conventions, we all know, are an inconvenient nuisance that get in the way of economic expediency. May the day soon come when government ministers are replaced by hotel managers, who are not nearly so machiavellian.

sincerely,
Anne